U.S. Vice-President J. D. Vance

NAZI REVANCHISM IN THE UNITED STATES

 

Trump Officials Attack a German Consensus on Nazis and Speech

By Jim Tankersley

The New York Times

February 15, 2025

Vice President JD Vance and Elon Musk have challenged decades-long approaches to political extremism that were designed to prevent another Hitler.

The American vice president visited a concentration camp on Thursday afternoon. He laid a wreath at the foot of a statue, made the sign of the cross and paused before a memorial wall where in multiple tongues, including German and English, the words “Never Again” were written.

JD Vance told reporters he had read about the Holocaust in books, but that its “unspeakable evil” was driven home by his trip to Dachau, where more than 30,000 people died at the hands of the Nazis. “It’s something that I’ll never forget, and I’m grateful to have been able to see it up close in person,” Mr. Vance said.

But after Mr. Vance spoke in Munich the next day, Germany’s leaders effectively questioned if he had understood what he had just seen.

Eighty years after American soldiers liberated Dachau, top German officials this weekend all-but accused Mr. Vance — and by extension, President Trump — of boosting a political party that many Germans consider to be dangerously descended from Nazism.

That party, called the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, is sitting second in the polls for next Sunday’s parliamentary elections, with about 20 percent of the public saying they support it. But no other German party is willing to govern with it. That’s because the AfD has at times downplayed Hitler’s atrocities. Some party members have reveled in Nazi slogans.

German intelligence agencies have classified parts of the AfD as extremist. Members have been arrested in connection with multiple plots to overthrow the government. Some reportedly attended last year a gathering that included discussions of deporting not only asylum seekers, but German citizens who immigrated to the country.

“A commitment to ‘never again’ is not reconcilable with support for the AfD,” Chancellor Olaf Scholz said in Munich on Saturday morning, as part of a lengthy rebuke of Mr. Vance.

“This ‘never again’ is the historical mission that Germany as a free democracy must and wants to continue to live up to every day,” he said. “Never again fascism, never again racism, never again war of aggression.”

Decades of German law and political practice have revolved around the belief that to prevent another Hitler from coming to power, the government must ban hate speech and shun political parties deemed extreme. The nation has an Office for the Protection of the Constitution, with intelligence tools to monitor extremists, and a constitutional court that in rare cases can ban parties entirely.

Mr. Vance, like another Trump administration official, Elon Musk, has parachuted into the country’s parliamentary elections, criticizing that approach. Both men say it is time for Germans to stop policing speech and to start treating the country’s hard-right flank as the avatars of disenfranchised voters who share Mr. Trump’s opposition to large-scale immigration.

Mr. Musk has publicly endorsed the AfD, telling party members last month that Germans have “too much of a focus on past guilt.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/15/world/europe/vance-musk-nazis-afd-munich.html

Guess what?

The fascism you see in the U.S. under Trump is the same as that of Opus Dei in the Roman Catholic Church. Opus Dei is Catholofascism. It’s the elephant in the room.

It requires a politically sophisticated mind to see it.

The Roman Catholic religion exists in politically syncretist forms.

Vance belongs to a constellation of political forces in the U.S. that includes the Catholic right and Opus Dei.

Fascism coopts liberal democracy until it can mount an effective takeover of the political system. This historical habit is exactly what is happening in the U.S. now.

Democratic Germany is correct in resisting Nazi revanchism and in describing Vance’s support of far-right politics as “unacceptable” (Defense Minister Boris Pistorius).